Ironclad
by Gradual Decay
Summary: Kirito and Asuna were not the only would-be heroes of Sword Art Online. Others had just as many dreams, hopes and fears while trapped in this digital nightmare. This is the story of the Aincrad Liberation Force, and of their struggle to free the lost souls of SAO...or die in the attempt.


**SWORD ART ONLINE**

 **IRONCLAD**

 **Prologue**

 _This was supposed to be a game._

Draygon's fingers trembled when he clutched his sword. They fumbled around the hilt, but froze when he tried to draw it out.

 _If you don't fight, you'll die._

Kibaou's words still rung in his ears, and were all that stopped him from suddenly turning around and bolting back down the winding staircase, out the dungeon door, and into the thick undergrowth of the forest below. He would die that way, he knew it. But he would die moving forward, too.

 _I'm stronger than that. The fact that I made it this far at all means that I'm stronger than they were_.

Before he could think to let fear stop him, his sword was in his hand. But his hands were still shaking and his breath still ragged as he ascended the staircase on steps woven from digital sunlight. If you squinted hard enough, Lomyr had said, you could make out the pixels, but Draygon didn't want to try. The more real this world seemed to him, the saner he was.

 _Am I sane? After that, could anyone be?_

Kibaou had led an expedition of over one hundred warriors to clear the 25th Floor, and the majority were veterans. Hardened and battle-tested, they had all cleared floors together before, and there was no reason why this floor should have been any different. He had been joking, _joking_ , of all things, with Kretos and Lomyr right before they set out. It was standard clearing. They all had high stats, strong armour and expensive weaponry; they were far more numerous than their enemies were likely to be; and if worst came to worst, they could always use a teleport crystal to get out. The risk of death was minimal.

They had lost half their numbers since they entered Floor 25.

Vaxia was the first to die, the "Hero of Floor 23" who had brought down the Dreadnought boss only two levels before. A false step sent her hurtling through a pit trap and impaled her on the spikes underneath. There was no blood in Sword Art Online – the developers had seen fit to spare them that trauma as they systematically murdered thousands of innocents - but a deep red light spread across her avatar where the giant needle cut through her spine, before turning white and shattering into countless shards of light.

That was when they first realised that this Floor was different. The traps were a new addition and they learned to walk more carefully from then on. Not that it did Sakeshi any good, who was riddled with arrows when she activated a tripwire. Nor Bontaus, who took a moment to rest and fell right through the supposedly stable ground into the murky blackness of the churning bog beneath them. A rope trap sent Kretos dangling helplessly in the air, and Freyja had to cut off his leg so that he wouldn't be easy prey for the Shriekers. The trees hemmed them in on all sides and a dozen paths conjoined and dispersed throughout the forest, creating an arboreal labyrinth that sent their orientation into disarray. They had fought their way through a sea of monsters only to find themselves back where they had begun.

Jaema, Kurros, Elsan, Swedic, Varryn. Shansho, Horukoji, Tymeo and Jamusai. The others' names he couldn't even remember; in his mind all their faces merged into a single white burst of digital light. He grappled the sides of his head, desperately hoping to squeeze the memories out, but all he felt was his nerves pulsing beneath his fingertips. It was all too much. He knew that in the real world, they were pulsing too, under a heavy chunk of metal wired to his senses while his comatose body lay motionless in a hospital bed.

A sudden hand on his shoulder kindly jolted him from his ruminations. Freyja stared down at him concernedly. High cheekbones and hazel eyes that looked gold beneath her blonde fringe made Freyja a pretty sight to see, but only if you strained your neck, as she was well over six feet tall. Draygon had not received the same blessing. He was shorter than average, skinny, weedy, with a bad case of acne, eyes too far apart, an overly large forehead and a rat's nest of thick black tangles for hair which always remained greasy no matter how often he washed it. He sorely missed his avatar, a strapping simulation of muscles and rugged handsomeness, with blue eyes and silky blonde hair which waved in the wind. Kayaba had shattered that illusion on the day this all began, along with so much else. But even now he still looked better than the man slung over her back. Kretos' face was pale and gaunt when once it had been handsome and full of life. He was struggling to stay conscious, murmuring incomprehensibly.

"Draygon, stay strong. Remember what Kibaou said. It's not over until you let it be over." Freyja told him softly.

"I'm fine…" He managed, but his entire body was trembling now and he was struggling to even speak without choking up. _I wish she didn't call me by that name_. When he had entered his username for SAO, back when this all really was just a game, he had thought it made him sound cool – cooler than Utaku, which was, after all, only a vowel away from _otaku_. Now he would give anything to hear his old name again, his real name. If it was from his mum's lips, or his dad's, all the better.

 _What am I good for?_

Freyja frowned at him, clearly unbelieving.

"Come on, there's not much further to go. It's just the boss, and then we can get out of here. We can go home."

"…Home?"

Freyja bit her lip. "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. Back to Floor 1, anyway. It's safe there."

Kretos' eyes fluttered open. He had been the liveliest of them, once. Draygon could still hear his bawdy laughter, swinging a flagon of ale in his hand, with the other either on his swordbelt or around the nearest woman's shoulder. Now he stared back at him with eyes like dying embers where a fire once burned.

"M-My leg…" He rasped, his voice hoarse from pain, "Draygon…they took my leg."

Draygon remembered. The Shriekers had emerged all of a sudden from the forest, grotesque monsters twice as tall as anyone among them, with thick leathery skin, gnarled fingers, spindly hair sprouting up from all over its body and the small black eyes, gargantuan ears and fierce teeth of a bat. And the noise they made... it wormed its way inside your ears, reverberating against the inside of your skull. But nobody turned and fled. They were brave people - practically soldiers at this point - and they had gone out to meet them, swords in hand, ready to face the challenge.

Four Shriekers died, and fourteen soldiers. The rest ran. They ran and ran and ran, their formation in tatters, with the Shriekers giving chase behind them, moving faster than they would have believed, faster than any monster they had ever faced before. Swords had sliced against their skin over and over again, and each time their HP had reduced only by a mere slither as they crushed warriors underfoot, or smashed their skulls with their fists, or hurled them flailing down into their throats. Their ferocity hadn't left the ones they lost enough time to use the teleport crystals, but once they had broken out of their horrified stupor, the medics were quick enough to use them. Only the highest ranking members of the guild had personal teleport crystals. The other crystals were hoarded by medics, who were supposed to provide them to any guild member in a dangerous situation. Well, they were all in a very dangerous situation, but that didn't seem to matter anymore; in flashes of blue light, they vanished, along with some of the finest warriors the guild had to offer – and all of the other teleport crystals with them. Save one, which had slipped from the hands of a medic and rolled onto the muddy ground. At least, that was what Kretos told him afterwards. All Draygon saw was Kretos turning back, and a moment later saw him snared in a rope trap. But a look was all he gave him. Draygon didn't stop for even a moment to help his friend.

 _I'm such a coward._

Instead, he was rescued by Freyja, who barely knew him.

 _What am I good for?_

Draygon's eyes had been dead straight in front of him the whole time, too scared to look back and see those things, to see his comrades screaming and shattering. He saw trees and leaves and long grass, but he heard the sounds behind him all the same. And then he heard a woman grunting, a boy screaming, a loud thud, quick and heavy footsteps, and suddenly Freyja was beside him, with Kretos on her back, out cold. Her countenance was grim, but there was something else, in her eyes, Draygon remembered, not like Kretos' dead, empty gaze, but something electric, and alive…

 _It was fear,_ Draygon realised.

"I've tried telling him," she said, exasperated. "Over and over, that none of this is real, that he only needs a healing crystal to get it back, but he only…" She chewed on her lip some more. "I can't get through to him."

It was in her eyes now, too. _She's just as afraid as I am_. Suddenly, Draygon felt stupid, and ashamed. Of course she was frightened. She had been on the front line against the Shriekers. She had gone face to face with those monsters, and must have seen friends die all around her, and that, if nothing else, was real. Freyja had never been particularly sociable, but she had fought alongside those people a dozen times and doubtless must have had bonded with some of them. Yet for all that, Freyja was doing her best to fight on and be strong for her fellow guild members, while Draygon had cried with the rest of them at the foot of the dungeon entrance, chanting for home and brandishing their weapons against their own comrades.

 _What am I good for?_

They had spent days in that forest. They had escaped the first pack of Shriekers they had encountered after crossing the stream and learning that they could not follow. For a while, they thought they were safe. Then night came again, and a Shrieker descended on the camp. Wherever there were trees, there were Shriekers, and the forest was huge. It was the largest map they had encountered by far, and even making a furious pace during the day, they were still unable to escape Shrieker territory when they came at nightfall. Unlike other maps the forest had no single clear path, instead offering a plethora of routes so twisted and labyrinthine that real progress was virtually impossible. And the traps were everywhere, camouflaged and brutal. They moved across as many streams as they could find, but there would always be more Shriekers waiting on the other side. It was a nightmare which would never end.

Until it did. The first wave of scouts Kibaou sent out didn't return, nor the second. A few from the third and fourth came back, empty-handed. It was only on the fifth wave that a scout returned from the forest with a route out of the maze. Klydas was an obvious choice for the task; keen-eyed, nimble and subtle, and yet Kibaou lingered until the point of desperation to send him out. Draygon couldn't tell exactly why, but he did know that there was something about Klydas that didn't ring right with him, nor for the majority of the guild, rookies and veterans alike.

But whatever his character, Klydas managed to rescue them from that hell. The route was not a safe one by any means, with traps as well as endless packs of Shriekers lying in wait. But if the previous scouting missions were worth anything, they taught them that the Shriekers' one weakness lay in their eyesight; so long as they stuck above ground up in the trees, they were safe. Relatively. The way out still witnessed too many casualties, and by the time they pushed their way out of the dense foliage and into a wide open field without a monster in sight, they couldn't tell if their tears were for misery or joy. They had thought themselves free at last; free from fear, free from suffering, and free to go home. Until Kobatz reminded them that they still needed to clear the dungeon.

It was basic player knowledge that to clear a Floor you had to clear the dungeon at the end of it. To get to the dungeon, first you had to clear the Field which occupies most of the Floor and defeat the Field Boss. From thereon out, you needed to map your way through the dungeon's Labyrinth and take out the Floor Boss in order to advance to the next floor. Everyone knew the rules, but everyone had wilfully forgotten them in their relief. But Kobatz remembered, and wasted no time to point out the white tower nearby.

The first voice was Lomyr's.

"You're kidding, right?" His voice was quavering. "After what...after what we've just been through, after all we've lost - you want us to continue?"

Lomyr was of an ordinary height, but Kobatz towered over him. A pair of sharp eyes beneath a thick brow and close-cropped hair locked onto Lomyr like a rifle.

"Are you suggesting that we retreat, soldier?"

Lomyr was silent. His blonde hair was damp with sweat. Fear shone in his pale blue eyes, but he didn't cast them away from Kobatz's penetrating glare.

"Did we clear the 23rd floor by retreating, even when the Furin Kazan Guild ran with their tails between their legs?"

"Vaxia's dead," Lomyr spat out, "And so is half our squad."

The two stood watching each other for a small long moment. Kobatz standing stalwart, eyes boring intensely down at Lomyr, hand on his sword hilt. Lomyr trembling even in his defiance, tears glistening in his eyes, but never breaking his stare.

"Think carefully, boy," Kobatz growled in a harsh whisper, "There's no turning back now. We've lost all our teleport crystals."

"No," Lomyr retorted, misery turning to anger in his voice, " _We've_ lost our teleport crystals. We're just monster fodder, after all. But you and the captains can still teleport out of here whenever you want, while we get left behind to be slaughtered!"

A shout rung out in agreement. Then another, and another, until he found himself shouting too, and from then on out all semblance of order broke down. They were all screaming for a hundred different things, but one chant rose above the rest, the one on his lips and a dozen others:

"Home!" He cried. "Home! Home! HOME!"

Kobatz's face had grown red with frustration and panic. He drew his sword only to meet thirty others from his squadmates. Some withheld and marched over to Kobatz's side, but although they were few and the mutineers were many, Kobatz was backed up by some of the strongest players in the guild. Among others, he spotted Quint, Gallia and Shiro. Freyja was there too, but she looked hesitant. She was the only one on either side without her sword drawn, though she was repeatedly tugging at the hilt before hesitating and letting it go again. Klydas stood apart from both parties, looking vaguely bemused. He couldn't see Kretos. As for Draygon, he stood at the back of the crowd of rebels, away from the accusing eyes of the comrades he was betraying, brandishing digital steel behind a wave of braver soldiers.

 _I'm such a coward._

It had been the same in life, too. Utaku had always sat at the back of the class, away from the mockery of his classmates and the criticism of his teachers. To what few social gatherings he was invited to, he stood in the corner and watched as the events went by before him and without him. He never felt comfortable as an individual, only as a face in the crowd.

 _What am I good for?_

He had thought that life in the virtual world would be different. In Sword Art Online, Utaku became Draygon, and Draygon was someone else entirely - someone braver and someone stronger; a hero who slew monsters and saved people in an incredible, impossible world, not a nerdy loner with failing grades from a broken home that he knew to be his fault. In fact, when the game's developer, Akihiko Kayaba, had removed the ability to log out of the VR game, beneath his initial panic at the reality of death here, Draygon had felt strangely happy. Now he could stay in this world forever. He could be Draygon forever. But if that were true, why was Utaku cowering behind others and letting down his superiors once again?

 _It was supposed to be a game._

He never thought he'd long to feel the real world again. Now it seemed like he never would.

"Back down, Kobatz."

Kobatz swung his head behind him, his broad face marked with shock and confusion. "But...you don't mean we're..."

"All I mean is that if you chop up our raiding party there's no way in hell we're gonna clear this god damn floor." Kibaou was short, rude and not much to look at. He had a thick jaw, small eyes and a face so chiselled it looked almost hexagonal, with a sprout of a goatee and light red hair which grew from his head in tufts like weeds. Yet somehow he never failed to command the attention of the entire guild. As he walked up to them, every eye was on him while he stared down the band of mutineers as if he were a head taller than Kobatz.

"I ain't gonna lie to you. This whole mission's been a shitshow, it really has. Some punk bitch gave me some dodgy info - and she'll pay, you got my word on it - and this party should've been ten times the size. I ain't never seen stats like those Shriekers have. But if we're still alive, even after that fuckin' travesty back there, do you really think there's anything in that dungeon that could kill _us_?"

A light murmuring surfaced among the dissidents, and they began to glance at each other, reading their reactions. Draygon began to feel more like Draygon again. It had been horrific, but he had survived, hadn't he? Maybe he wasn't so weak as he thought. But even so, the thought of facing more, stronger monsters in that tower...

"Even if ya turned back now, there are still plenty Shriekers in that forest, more spawnin' every moment, just waitin' to tear you apart into itsy bitsy data-bytes. Yeah, it's true, we at the top have still got some teleport crystals. But we're still here, ain't we? If we were gonna desert you, we'd have done it when the rest of them cowards did, back when the Shriekers first appeared. And hey, if you're still not convinced..."

Kibaou summoned the Options Menu with the tip of his finger, scrolled down to Items, and selected the teleport crystal. It appeared in his hand, bright and blue, glowing with promise. Every eye in the crowd yearned for it, and regarded Kibaou with suspicion.

"Here's mine,' Kibaou announced, "And here's what I say to retreat." Kibaou stretched back his arm, and hurled the crystal into the forest.

A soft breeze whispered through the air and leaves began to rustle. A few distant shrieks erupted from the woods, doubtless disturbed by the new arrival. Other than that, there was silence. Silence and shocked faces were the mark of everyone there, Kobatz most of all. Draygon didn't know whether to scream or cheer. _You idiot_ , he wanted to scream, _you've doomed yourself!_ But at the same time, Kibaou had chosen to risk his own safety for his men. He had never known Kibaou personally, but all of a sudden, he respected him. He was clearly Leader for a reason.

"If ya die, I die with ya. But it ain't over unless we let it be over! Do ya want everyone who has died here to have died for nothin'? There's no turnin' back, and if ya go forward like ya are now, like some beaten dog that's lost its bite, then we're gonna die for sure. Where's ya passion? Where's ya spine? Where is tha pride of the Aincrad Liberation Squad, 'cause I sure as hell don't see it here!"

Shocked faces turned guilty and ashamed. Slowly, swords returned to their sheaths, and Draygon followed suit.

"We're gonna storm that tower and we're gonna get to tha next floor. If ya don't fight, you'll die. And if ya die, die with fire in ya hearts."

"To victory!" Came a shout. To Draygon's astonishment, it came from within the rebel group.

"To liberty!" Another chimed in, and soon enough, both sides of the stand-off were chanting in unison. "To the ALS! To victory, to liberty, to the ALS!" And there was a second chant too, which began softly but grew ever louder and louder. "Kibaou! Kibaou! KIBAOU!" Draygon was chanting along too, as was Kobatz, Freyja, even Lomyr. The only mouths which weren't moving were those of Kretos, still unconscious, and of Klydas, who looked positively bored and wandered sullenly back to join the others.

He had genuinely felt as if he could handle the carnage yet to come. After all, the Field Boss, a hulking ogre with a hunched back and a bloated body, was taken down with only two casualties - the number seemed small after all they had just witnessed - with Kibaou fighting front and centre, dealing death with every blow of his cleaver, flanked by the otherworldly skills of Freyja and Shiro. Draygon himself had even managed to land a critical hit. He had felt like a hero again.

That was before they had entered the white tower, though. When the shadows had moved _from_ the walls and the 'heroes' had been plucked off one by one while he was so uselessly standing by frozen in terror, running headlong through the labyrinth desperately searching for the nearest safe space, so that it might finally end - _OH GOD, LET IT END, LET IT END-_

Draygon's mind recoiled back to the present, to Freyja climbing the stairs beside him with Kretos slung over her back like a corpse. He couldn't face those memories. The forest at least was a few days in the past, and his mind had had time to heal as much as it could, but in the Labyrinth, the wounds were still too raw. When he remembered...it was as if it was happening all over again. Faces black and featureless emerging from the walls, friends choking, ephemeral hands grabbing on to his leg in the dark...he was losing his grip on time. Pasts and present were all crashing into each other into a single screaming white wreckage within the walls of his mind, within the walls of this tower. Only the future was absent. Draygon knew why.

 _Maybe I am going crazy._

"Freyja," he croaked, "How much further?"

Freyja turned back to him. She looked surprised and relieved.  
"You're back...um, three more flights from here. If you look up you can-"

"Back?" Draygon interjected, "What...what do you mean by back?" A pounding anxiety grated its claws against his forehead.

Freyja hesitated. "You spaced out for a while back there. You kept walking, but there was no getting through to you. It's...it's been known to happen among veterans. Just don't worry about it too much."

Freyja's words had stopped making sense to him by this point. _Don't worry about it?_ _I'm losing my mind and I shouldn't worry about it?_ He wanted to scream. But instead he just nodded quietly and kept walking, step by sad step; forwards - because there was no turning back.

At the summit of the glowing staircase was a towering archway with two colossal doors fitted beneath. Beyond that door, Draygon knew, was the Floor Boss, and the end of their journey, one way or the other. The forty-odd survivors were sprawled out on the ethereal porch before it. Draygon had been unable, or maybe just unwilling, to recall the names and faces of those who had died in this second ring of fire, but at least a dozen faces that he no longer knew the names of were missing.

Kibaou went off to confer with Kobatz while Freyja laid Kretos down by the porch and did her best to console him. Shiro was tossing his spear from hand to hand in agitated boredom, Quint was staring gloomily into the abyss from the edge of the porch, Klydas was napping. Lomyr sat in the centre of the porch, shivering, with wide eyes staring into nothing. His HP was deep into the red zone. _Kibaou won't make him fight with that, surely._ But then, everyone who had reached this stage had HP at least in the orange zone, even Kibaou and Freyja. Whatever healing crystals they had had long been exhausted. His own health bar was higher than those of most of the people here - his cowardice had seen to that - but sideways swipes from the Field Boss and the harsh caress of the dark ones had drained his health to orange with the rest of them. He would be fighting whatever waited beyond those doors, he knew that for certain. All there was to do now was wait. And wait he did. Freyja had been called to confer with Kibaou, so he considered going to comfort Kretos or Lomyr, but what could he tell them? He wasn't strong like Freyja. Having him around would only make them feel even worse. So Draygon sat before the doors of death and waited for eternity.

He held up his sword and stared at it long and hard. His focus drowned out first the groans of the wounded, and then the wounded themselves, as the world became just him, the sword, and the piercing ringing in his head. And the longer he stared, the more fragmented the sword became. Hard steel broke up into faded grey squares, and the sword lost its edge as it blended with the world around him. And then it hit him.

 _This was supposed to be a game_ , he had thought, but that was wrong. _This is a game_. Draygon was good at games. He had failed at school, he had failed at making friends, he had failed his parents. But he didn't need to worry about any of that now. Despite how real this world felt at times, and despite how frightening that may be, when it came down to it, Sword Art Online was only a video game. _The HP bars_. He wanted to smack himself in the head for being so stupid. How could something so obviously fake seem real to him? How could he have been deceived all this time? Why on earth was he wishing to return to a reality where he was weak and unfulfilled? Video games were Draygon's realm, and Utaku had no business here trying to slow him down. Here, he could fight, he could win, he could live.

When he looked up from the grey pixels, Kibaou was shouting to form ranks, and the doors were opening.

Draygon was swept up in the small sea of marching men, ironclad, with swords at the ready to face whatever monster lay beyond those doors. _Heroes_ , he thought, s _aviours_. His actions here would bring everyone in this world one step closer to their freedom. And after that step was taken, he would go onto the next floor and take the next one, and the next one, and the next one, until every last floor was cleared and every damned soul trapped here would wake up in their hospital beds safe and sound. He would be the man to end the nightmare of Sword Art Online. _That's_ what he was good for. That was his purpose.

Beyond the doorway was darkness, but for a single burning sconce at the back of the room. It threw an arrow of light beneath the hulking feet of the Floor Boss, a giant at least twelve metres tall, armoured in black iron and wielding a broadsword of its own. Two helmets crowned its twin heads - one looked almost human, but the other was bestial, fierce and snarling. On seeing the soldiers marching towards it, it bellowed a powerful roar from both mouths. Draygon was unfazed. Because past it, he could see another door. And beyond that, he knew, was a staircase, and their way out.

"Left wing," Kibaou shouted, "Charge!"

This time, Draygon led. And he screamed. He screamed as he charged forward towards the six-foot steel and the eyes of the monstrous head. He screamed as the last leeches of fear were flung off his body, as he charged to the music of a thousand feet behind him. He screamed as he died, with fire in his heart.


End file.
